Visual Design How-Tos for E-Learning Developers

Everyone wants to create e-learning that looks like it was designed by a professional—clean, compelling, and inspiring. But not everyone has access to professional graphic designers or an ample budget to shop for pro-designed graphic assets. But there’s good news. There are straightforward design principles you can follow to create great-looking e-learning, no matter your resources or budget.

We’ve rounded up our go-to guides on visual design plus a bunch of free templates and graphic assets that’ll help you solve this challenge.

Understand the Principles of Good Design

Get on the fast track to good design! We’ll show you how to pick colors, fonts, and layouts that are clear, readable, and compelling. Here’s what you need to know:

Essential Guide to Visual Design: In this comprehensive e-book, we walk you through the components of good visual design and show you how to avoid common missteps.

Get Gorgeous Freebies

Thankfully, no e-learning designer ever has to start from scratch. There are tons of free templates, graphic assets, and more that you can use to achieve a sophisticated look even when you’re short on time.

Templates: The E-Learning Heroes community is chock-full of freebies for all the tools in Articulate 360 and PowerPoint. You’ll find all kinds of designs that are easy to repurpose in your own projects.

Course Assets: E-Learning Heroes also has tons of icons, button sets, images, and backgrounds you can use to spice up your course.

Content Library: If you subscribe to Articulate 360, you get unlimited access to 2+ million stock assets, including images, videos, icons, templates, and characters. (And if you don’t subscribe, you can get a free trial to take a look!).

When you’re getting started with pre-built templates, you might want to make a few tweaks to give the slides your organization’s look and feel. Here are two useful guides to transforming assets to get the right look:

10 Minute E-Learning Template Transformations: In this series, Trina shows you how she quickly and easily transforms free templates to get the look she’s aiming for—while still taking advantage of the layouts and interactions in the original.

I find that I can apply some app design methodologies when creating courses in Storyline. Google's Material design guidelines are very comprehensive and tools such as the Colour Tool https://material.io/color/ give designers a neat way of testing the appearance and accessibility of their colour choices across a number of common slide layouts.